lioness having sex 100 times while she\u2019s in heat<\/a>. There are albatrosses that, it wasn\u2019t until we started analyzing their DNA, we found were living in same-sex pairs and reproducing effectively with sperm from a neighbor male, and heterosexual long-term albatross relationships, too. So when we look at how animals are making choices about their lives, there\u2019s a lot of sexual diversity. There are a lot of different strategies that are the right choice for them in the ecological niche that they live in that they are expert at thriving in.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sara Lipshutz talks about how sex is composed of multiple variables. So it could be what sex cells an animal makes. Do they make egg or sperm? What chromosomes do they have? It can be what genitalia they have. It can be their physiology. Are they larger or smaller? What are they doing with their body? How is their body allocating resources? It can be behavioral. In some animals, the males are the only providers of parental care. In others, predominantly in mammals, mostly females are providing the care.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s all these different variables. But these variables are interacting differently with each other in different organisms. And so when we talk about sex, being as specific as we can to the species in question\u2014and what sex looks like in that model\u2014is really important to starting to have a definition for the word sex that is more expansive, and more effective, and more accurate.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWillow\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
It couldn\u2019t be a more critical time for this to be coming out. We are living in a moment where biological sex has a period after it. It\u2019s used to justify the oppression of reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, women\u2019s rights. And it\u2019s wild because I think, as you discovered in creating this book, when you talk to the people who really study biological sex, they don\u2019t have one definition for it. They don\u2019t have one answer for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve spent so much time focused specifically on gender, which is one expression of sex, but we need to be having the conversation around sex too, because I think when we shy away from it, we\u2019re actually doing ourselves a disservice because the natural world has such a massive amount of diversity.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPerrin\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Yeah. Andrea Long Chu wrote an essay called \u201cFreedom of Sex\u201d where she argues that when we\u2019re denying trans kids medical care, we\u2019re talking about the freedom to change one\u2019s tissues.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I read that while I was working on the barnacle section of the book, and barnacles change how they want to sexually develop depending on the environment that they wind up in and what works best for them as a sexual strategy in that environment, and they will literally change the length of their penis depending on water conditions. They are embodying freedom of sex by changing their tissues.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
And of course, there\u2019s such a rough history of this sort of animal-human, dangerous comparison that can happen and be weaponized and used in harmful ways.\u00a0 But when I was drawing that section and reading that essay, I was like, \u201cOh, this is what we\u2019re actually talking about when we talk about animal sexual diversity, is the way they can teach us in this moment that we do need to talk about freedom of sex.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two people who really made the book a whole lot better are the trans historian of science, Beans Velocci, and Sam Sharpe. They have a book coming out where they attempted to pinpoint the moment in science when we landed on the binary, and they were unable to find it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The dismantling of the scientific enterprise in America is specifically targeting trans projects, trans research projects, and trans scientists. And DOGE has put on these AI trackers where any study that has the words LGBTQ, same sex, even female in it is getting tagged and tossed from the funding model. A diverse cohort of people made this book so much better. I think they make science so much better.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWillow\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
I also want to talk about the role that humor plays in this book, because you are such a hilarious person, and I\u2019ve seen you speak about the book also publicly a number of times, and it could be a comedy set. I mean, why is humor such an important tool?<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPerrin\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a child of the 1980s and \u201890s, Sting had left the Police and he was doing Rainforest Crunch, and the proceeds from all profits went to the rainforest. And I was like, \u201cLove this guy, he\u2019s a hottie and I want to protect the rainforest.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve only ever known a sense of loss, despair, and scarcity when it comes to the natural world, and to habitat loss, and to these animals that kids universally love. I spent 10 years as a communicator in the environmental movement, and NRDC was a great place to do that. I was allowed so much creativity, freedom, and opportunity to collaborate with amazing people and practice different ways to tell these stories. And the environmental movement has communicated from a place of loss, panic, urgency in order to try to wake people up and to get them to pay attention and to take action. And I really wanted to try, in starting to tell these stories about animal sex, to invite people in from a place of pleasure.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sex touches all of our lives in some way. And I have lots of asexual people interacting with my work and requesting asexual stories. It\u2019s not all about Pound Town, though, as we know, that is a deep interest of mine. But hey, sex is funny. Everybody talks about sex. Come on in. We will then be talking about the way that the loss of the forest impacts chimpanzee culture, contributes to cultural loss, and sex is a part of culture. And so we\u2019re going to have that conversation once you\u2019re here.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I mean, in terms of humor, though, I will say I personally feel that the jokes absolutely write themselves when it comes to nature. Nature is a gag a minute. You could not make this shit up. I was talking to my friend, Amber Tamblyn, on her Substack about this incredible paper that came out. These Bolivian scientists published a paper where they were like, \u201cWe accidentally eavesdropped on Bolivian dolphins using an anaconda as a sex toy. They are a highly reclusive species. We took like 12 hours of video hoping to just capture a fin, and these dolphins had rock hard boners with this anaconda out of the water for hours, and hours, and hours.\u201d And then they went back and were processing the film, and they were like, \u201cMuch to our chagrin, this is a novel behavior observation, and we will have to publish it.\u201d And so those things just truly keep me going, how funny nature is, and how constantly she\u2019s pranking us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willow A big throughline of this work is that sexual diversity is biodiversity. For anyone who is new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[93023,49,48,88777,66,323],"class_list":["post-787502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-art-culture","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-changemakers","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}